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You had to see this coming. The U.S. Federal Reserve is now being subjected to cries for transparency that it has said are necessary for the financial institutions it regulates. The campaign is being spearheaded by Florida Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson. Believe it or not, no one currently audits the Federal Reserve's accounts. And some skeptics have come to think that the Federal Reserve's fiscal house is not in order and that the Fed has actually not been able to balance its books and account for all the assets it has purchased. Zero Hedge claims the Fed cannot account for nearly $9 trillion in off-balance sheet transactions.

This is the market view from five prominent stock market bloggers. I asked them each one simple question: Where do you think the market is headed, and why? Here are their responses (listed in alphabetical order):

James Altucher – TheStreet.com

Altucher is a financial journalist for the Financial Times, daily contributor to TheStreet.com (NASDAQ: TSCM), and founder of Stockpickr. His articles cover every angle of the market; he also stars in feature videos with other financial luminaries. He is the author of Trade like a Hedge Fund, Trade Like Warren Buffett, SuperCa$h, andThe Forever Portfolio.

"The market sold off too much. S&P 700 was anticipating the apocalypse, which is not happening. With $15 trillion in stimulus worldwide happening over the next one to four years there is only one hedge for inflation: owning a broad spectrum of stocks. Buy internets, nuclear energy (Altucher mentions Shaw Group (NYSE: SGR), Cameco Corp (NYSE: CCJ) and USEC Inc (NYSE: USU) in THIS video segment), gold producers, and healthcare stocks."

1. ChrisPerruna.com – the most well organized stock blog around, very useful analysis
2. Dealbreaker.com – if you want Wall Street gossip, this is where you go
3. FeedTheBull.com – an up and coming site where bloggers can submit articles and users can vote their favorites
4. HowardLindzon.com – one of the godfathers of stock blogging, a real pro investor focusing on stocks making new highs
5. pfblogs.org – a blog comprised of posts from 1,000 different finance bloggers, say good-bye to whatever life you had

It's hard to ignore any investment actions taken by the world's richest man, or any entity associated with him for that matter, so when the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently announced that it had taken an interest in homebuilding companies, the news caught the attention of Bernie Schaeffer, the editor of The Option Advisor.

In particular, Bernie is intrigued by Centex (NYSE: CTX), which the Gates' disclosed as one of those homebuilders in which it had invested. And while that hat news led to a quick gain of 4% in the shares, Schaeffer remains bullish.

He explains, "Technically, the stock vaulted it back above support at its 10-week moving average. In conjunction with its 20-week counterpart, these trend lines have provided support for CTX since the middle of August. The stock has additional support at its rising 50-month moving average, which it has not closed a month below since July 2000."

Despite its strong technical position, the contrarian analyst notes that pessimism – based on put and call buying by speculators - is still prevalent on CTX. Further, he adds, nearly 10% of the stock's float is sold short, and this, he says, "creates fuel for a short-covering rally."

Insider Blogging looks at the blogs about our favorite companies, exposing the last legal way to get "inside information."

I'm what you might call a First Amendment scholar, having taken law-school-level courses on the subject and researched a number of such cases for my various, data-rich employers. And even though I'm a political liberal, I have a bias against extending "privacy" laws to online behavior, especially when said online behavior is conducted on very public services. I just don't agree that there is a "compelling interest" in protecting one's search behavior, especially if it can't be definitively traced back to the individual. In a free society, private enterprises should be able to do whatever they wish with the information you type into their tools; unless they've told you otherwise. In my opinion? Your behavior on a search engine is just as protectable as anything else you do in the public realm; what groceries you purchase, for instance, or what car you drive.

So I'm entirely not shocked that AOL put a bunch of customer search data (without, it must be noted, any identifying information about who did the searching) online 10 days ago. Now, apologies have been issued ("This was a screw-up, and we're angry and upset," says a spokesperson). I seem to be in the minority, however; the internet, it is horrified.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch seems to be most shocked, saying that "The utter stupidity of this is staggering ," [emphasis his] and he claims that "the abilitiy to analyze all searches by a single user will often lead people to easily determine who the user is, and what they are up to ... many people often search on their own name, or those of their friends and family, to see what information is available about them on the net. Combine these ego searches with porn queries and you have a serious embarrassment. Combine them with "buy ecstasy" and you have evidence of a crime. Combine it with an address, social security number, etc., and you have an identity theft waiting to happen. The possibilities are endless."

Wow. That's a bit inflammatory, Michael, don't you think?

Insider Blogging looks at the employees blogs of our favorite companies, exposing the last legal way to get "inside information."

I love rumors. I love conspiracy theories, especially when they're about the inner workings of corporations. And I love blogging celebrities.

That's why I love this story: it has all three, with a special dash of Microsoft thrown in. Brent Strange of QAInsight.net is serving up six reasons why he thinks Robert Scoble of Scobleizer and formerly of Microsoft is Mini-Microsoft, the anonymous insider blogger. I wondered that several months ago, but discarded it due to what Scoble mentions himself: their very divergent writing styles.

I had fun observing Robert Scoble from not-very-afar at Blogher (he was chatting with folks in the lobby whilst I walked back and forth, trying to get my toddler to sleep), and after having stalked him up close and personal I highly doubt it: Scoble is eager, zany, a bit of a nut (in a nice way! really!), while Mini seems tortured, secretive, highly stressed. These personalities shine through their writing and it would be difficult to imagine Scoble -- whose talents definitely lie more in technology than the literary arts -- putting on that mantle.

Strange's reasons include a coincidence of timing (Mini-Microsoft started about a year after Scoble's blog began, about the right amount of time for burnout; and Mini didn't post while Scoble was distracted by the death of his mother), the lack of "insider" information on Mini's blog since Scoble left Microsoft, and the lack of duplication between the two blogs -- Strange deeply analyzes the news covered by both blogs and finds no overlap. I'm not convinced, but the blogosphere loves a rumor, a conspiracy theory, and a brush with blogerati all rolled into one ...

Sarah Gilbert has a Wharton MBA and worked in investment banking for several years, then at a series of increasingly edgy startups before finding her calling, producing blogs for AOL. She doesn't own stock in Microsoft.

As long as I can remember internet being in my life, AOL has been there, in my mailbox. First it was the floppy disks, and then they moved up to CDs. My first visit to the AOL headquarters (in 2000, my dotcom startup wished to play with the big dogs) was memorable mostly for the huge conference tables, made of some sort of concrete mixed with thousands of tiny pieces of AOL CDs. I've seen AOL CDs hung from trees like Christmas ornaments, strewn in empty lots, filling up my toybox (the boys, they love the DVD cases).

Jon Miller wants to end all that. The New York Times takes a closer look at the reaction to his radical proposal to halt marketing of the AOL subscription service, and asks all the same questions Peter Cohan asked, like: how much subscription revenue (of the $7 billion in the past year) will AOL lose? And how long will it take the $1.2 billion of advertising revenue to fill in the gaps? And, is this just the flavor-of-the-quarter for Jon Miller, king of the "let's reinvent AOL" plans?

Jessica Reif-Cohen of Merrill Lynch is skeptical, and says, "things are going to get worse before they get better." David Cohen of Universal McCann says it's not a home run but the plan is "directionally positive." (That's faint praise if I've ever heard it.)

Is it more inflammatory in a headline to say, "death to Google" than "death to AOL" or "death to Yahoo!"? That seems to be what everyone's going with, today.

Because today is the day that everyone's reviewing the keynote speech of longtime cable exec Leo Hindery, at the Convergence 2.0 conference yesterday. Hindery (representing the "Washington Insider" viewpoint but, seemingly, attacking his subject matter in an Infrastructure-is-King Insider kind of way) represented the media universe as consisting of three pillars:

• Content (ABC, NBC, Disney, Time Warner's content side?),
• Portals (Google, Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, and eBay) and
• "Non-Broadcast Distributors" (notably, cable and the satellites)

He put numbers to everything, so I can make fun of it more easily. Portals have a collective market cap of $225 billion, he says. Advertising represents two-thirds of this, or about $150 billion. But as the content that makes up the backbone of these portals is non-proprietary, it will be easy for the content providers to steal that money away.

Hence, death to Google. And three of the other four (I haven't found where he said which of the content providers would survive).

The "Net Neutrality" debate is confusing, and I'm not the only one who thinks so. Andy Kessler from The Weekly Standard calls the issue "bizarre" and "hard to understand" and opines: "both sides are off their rocker." He argues that the answer is not regulation. The telcos and cable companies, he says, are loathe to upgrade their networks -- it's expensive, and, why would they without the government stepping in? They want neutrality regulations to be quelled because "without the ability to extract money from the webbies for the use of their not-so-fast Alexander Graham Bell-era wires (forget that you and I already overpay for this), AT&T or Verizon might not have any business model going forward."

Kessler's "modest proposal" is creative and a little diabolical (ergo: I love it). "Maybe the incumbent network providers--the Verizons, Comcasts, AT&Ts--can be made to compete; threatening to seize their stagnating networks via eminent domain is just one creative idea to get them to do this. A truly competitive, non-neutral network could work, but only if we know its real economic value. If telcos or cable charge too much, someone should be in a position to steal the customer. Maybe then we'd see useful services and a better Internet. Sounds like capitalism."

What does the blogerati think about the idea of seizing broadband in the name of eminent domain?

The Ultra-Mobile PC is so ... last week. Microsoft is heading even slimmer (and, more importantly: cheaper) with plans for a tiny computer code-named the Haiku -- about the size of a paperback book.

The Ultra-Mobile started out with the code name Origami (does Origami sound bigger than a Haiku to you? What a strange mix of Japanese metaphors) and, when it was finally released, many industry watchers thought the Haiku was history. Robert Scoble made a point of complaining about the $1000+ pricetag.

With a price of $500-$700, the Haiku eerily fits right in to Scoble's strategy (either he's just smart about these things, or someone in Microsoft is paying keen attention to his criticisms). Via Technologies will provide assistance on the project and it should be available in the next few years. The question is: where does the useful vs. cool tradeoff take place? Is it a pricepoint ($500 seemed to be Scoble's argument, where coolness could outweigh utility), or a functionality? Does it require billions of dollars of customer education, or will the market eventually catch up to the technology? Investors seem to be saying no, as Microsoft's stock goes ever-lower. I think the cool factor -- at MSFT's current bargain-basement price -- is worth betting on.

[Photo Francis]

Adobe's behavior with regards to Microsoft's attempt to include the ability to create PDF files out of Microsoft Office documents is, according to the Washington Post, "at best arrogance, at worst price collusion -- a violation of basic antitrust law." First Adobe told the world at large that it should feel free to utilize the company's PDF standard. And then Adobe let a number of other word processors do just that -- including, notably, Microsoft Word's biggest competitor, WordPerfect.

Then Adobe did a mid-stream switcheroo, and told Microsoft that if it wanted to include PDF creation ability in Microsoft Office 2007, the software manufacturer needed to charge separately for the feature. If not? A lawsuit would naturally follow.

Microsoft did the same thing I would have done: pulled PDF support from Office. And the Post's Rob Pegoraro wishes "that the bad old Microsoft would reemerge for this one occasion and tell Adobe to go pound sand," while admitting that many analysts with a sense of history remember that Microsoft has a habit of somehow poisoning standards when it incorporates them into its software packages.

Jeffrey Bewkes, president of Time Warner, told his Sports Illustrated magazine division to go take a flying leap when they wanted to partner with AOL's sports channel to build a giant sports web site. Synergies, he told the Wall Street Journal, are bullshit.

As someone who made part of her career not just believing in synergies but putting solid numerical values to them and offering them up, like holy sacraments of PowerPoint, to the strategists at gigantic corporations: this is a hard pill to swallow. And though I see it not working more often than not, I also see so many areas -- yes, within Time Warner, where I work today -- where it does work. Heck, everyday I make my bucks on the back of the synergy.

But instead of calling them "synergies," now, Time Warner is calling them "adjacencies." Sumner Redstone split up Viacom and CBS because the "clout" he was supposed to get from his company's huge size "got us nowhere." Is the day of the synergy over and done with?